Whatever Became of...The Boys Markets?

Above, the Hawthorne, California Boys Market store in the 1950s.

Back when I was a kid, my family used to shop at a supermarket on Vermont Avenue near 120th Street called The Boys in Los Angeles.

What I remember the most about it was that I was able to buy Aurora Plastics' Universal Pictures monster models (Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolf Man, The Mummy, etc.) in the store's toy department and saw Bozo the Clown (Vance Colvig) there.

Above, The Boys Market logo.

When we moved to Hawthorne, we shopped at Thriftimart or Ralphs, even though a Boys Market was there.

Then, in the late 1980, The Boys began to disappear.

According to LAist:

The Boys

Shortly after his father died, teenage Joe Goldstein and two of his brothers began selling fruit door-to-door to support their Boyle Heights family. Soon, they set up a produce stand along Telegraph Road in East Los Angeles. Folks would say they were going to visit "the boys'" stand. The name stuck. By the time the brothers opened their first market on the site in 1924, they were joined by another brother. By 1931, they'd opened what was billed as their first full-service market at Monte Vista St. and Avenue 55 in Highland Park. That market later served as the company's headquarters through the 1980s. The Boys turned their focus from suburban to urban locations, growing to 54 stores. The business stayed in the Goldstein family until 1988, when American Breco Company bought it. A year later, some suburban store names were changed to Market Basket, evoking a prior SoCal chain with the same name, that had only departed a few years earlier. Just 18 days later, American Breco merged into the Yucaipa Company (sound familiar?). A few stores still operated as The Boys as late as 1993. Then, the name faded into history.

To read more about bygone L.A. stores, go here.